I have often wondered if I would have converted to Catholicism as an adult if I had been born into some other religion. It is not an easy question to answer. I find the Catholic Church satisfying both intellectually and emotionally.
Life Wrapped in Meaning
I can see why Roman Catholicism continues to attract converts. I often ponder how intelligent adults who are members of other religions can resist its appeal. I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings at this time of the year, but there is no way to say it without saying it: I would not want to have to explain to myself why I was willing to live my life by the teachings of any of the founders of the Third World’s major religions. Sorry.
Yet, if pressed, I would concede that my attraction to Catholicism may be rooted in the fact that I was brought up in a Catholic home and went to Catholic schools where the Church served as both an anchor and a warm and comforting ambiance for the milestones of my life. It could be that I would be pondering why more Americans do not convert to Islam if I had been raised a Muslim. I don’t know. In any event, I understand what one of my uncles a man not given to emotional grandstanding meant when he used to say, “The Catholic Church has been at the center of everything good that has ever happened to me.”
My uncle was talking about baptisms, weddings, and graduations and Christmas mornings with his family. If you are not a Christian, you don’t have Christmas. Not the way we do. If you are not a Christian, you do not have Christ. And you do not have the loving God the Father Jesus revealed to us. That makes a powerful difference in an individual’s self-perception and evaluation of his place in the cosmos. People who know Christ and Christmas do not think of themselves as grains of sand on a pebble of planet adrift in the vast nothingness of space. They do not think of their lives as an “unpleasant interruption in blissful non-existence” to quote Albert Camus. They do not agree with MacBeth that life is a “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” We have been saved, washed in the blood of the Lamb.
Groping in the Dark
Consider the intellectual groping that takes place when individuals seek to understand the meaning of God without Christ’s description of the Father:
The God who is the Ground of Being cannot be owned. God is a universal presence undergirding all of life. God does not bless and curse individuals according to an imposed prescription of conduct. God, the source of life, calls us all to live fully. God, the source of love, calls us to have the courage to be ourselves. So when we live, love, and have the courage to be, we are engaged in worship, we are expanding our humanity, we are breaking out of our barriers.
The above words were written by Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong in his new book: Why The Church Must Change Or Die. Spong is not Catholic. He would consider it a compliment if someone were to call him a liberal and a modernist. But Catholics can sound equally vague when they try to explain God without taking Jesus’s words into account. A good example is an article in the October 18th issue of America entitled “The Deep Mystery of God.” The author, Michael McCauley, a professor of philosophy at the College of Southern Maryland, holds that the search for God takes us to the “unfathomable times and distances of the cosmos”; into a mystery that “can be answered in the end only with paradox and silence. Standing in front of it, you will not discover its beginning; standing behind it, you will not discover its end.”
McCauley uses the writings of Lao-Tzu, the founder the Chinese philosophy of Taoism, to deepen his students’ understanding of the mystery: “Lao Tzu calls it the Nameless: the Name that can be named is not the eternal Name. It is the mystery of mysteries, but also the door of all spiritual awareness and the mother of the universe. It appears empty, but its fullness is inexhaustible, like a bottomless bowl. It is soundless, invisible, intangible. How wondrous it is, exclaims Lao-Tzu, it existed before heaven and earth and even before God.” Got that?
The Real Christmas Surprise
McCauley is gratified to inform us that his students get the point, that “on the last day of class” they “are attentive, even reflective” when he tells them that “silence is the truest statement we can make about the Ultimate Source. To conceive is to shrink; to speak is to falsify.”
Perhaps McCauley’s class is a class in natural theology, one that focuses on what we can learn of God by unaided human reason. If that is the case, one can only hope that his students discover somewhere along the way that that there are other ways to think of God than as the “Nameless Name,” the “Ultimate Source” and the “Indefinable X.” That we can think of Him as a Loving Father Who forgives us our trespasses and answers prayers for our daily bread, Who loves His creation, Who numbers the hairs on our heads and is aware of every fallen sparrow; as a loving God Who so loved the world that He sent His Son to be its Savior.
Why do so many modern theologians prefer to explore the meaning of God as if Jesus had not entered history, as if there were no Incarnation, no Gospel, no Christmas? C.S. Lewis has much to teach on this score:
An “impersonal God” well and good. A subjective God of beauty, truth and goodness, inside our own heads better still. A formless life force surging through us, a vast power which we can tap best of all. But God Himself, alive, pulling at the other end of the cord, perhaps approaching at infinite speed, the hunter, king, husband that is quite another matter. There comes a moment when the children who have been playing at burglars hush suddenly: was that a real footstep in the hall? There comes a moment when people who have been dabbling at religion (“Man’s search for God!”) suddenly draw back. Supposing we really found Him? We never meant it to come to that! Worse still, supposing He had found us?
James Fitzpatrick's new novel, The Dead Sea Conspiracy: Teilhard de Chardin and the New American Church, is available from our online store. You can email Mr. Fitzpatrick at fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net.
(This article originally appeared in The Wanderer and is reprinted with permission. To subscribe call 651-224-5733.)